To this this is NOT the worst time ever to bring a child into the world

[Celebrityskint]

Quite often I see posts going on about today’s world being a terrible world to bring children into... but honestly... in the UK... we’re probably having a very good life compared to most people in most of history.... it’s not a terrible time to bring children into the world

There have always been doom-mongers who are convinced the world is about to end.

Until recently these people would typically have found an outlet in religion and been focussed on apocalyptic "the end is nigh" warnings. Now, in a less religious age, they've attached their gloom to a climate apocalypse.

All the people with sufficiently old enough children to be deemed morally acceptable individuals, who are berating people for having children currently, are going to make it extremely difficult for their children (who are already poised to pay back the extortionate public debts we are racking up). Retirement age of 90 seems good?

Life expectancy was far higher than 47 in 1950....... It was about 67 for men and 73 for women.

www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/articles/howhaslifeexpectancychangedovertime/2015-09-09

Answering purely on current times & what we are facing. I think the U.K. (or anywhere) isn’t great & I worry for my DD - climate change being my biggest concern. Also wages, crime & standard of living.

I bring my DD up with positivity & will always guide her to see the good in everything but I do sometimes feel like a hypocrite because actually, deep down, I do think it’s a bit shit. Year on year, life should improve or at least stay good but everything just seems so crap. I am also v worried about healthcare.

My adult DSs and their partners have decided not to have children.. why? purely because of climate change.
While it makes me really sad to know i'll never be a grandmother, i completely understand where they're coming from!

I was giving a world figure not a U.K. one.

Generally it seems when people claim "things in the world are worse than ever for people"....
"ever" means the past 10 years or so
"the world" means their city/town
"people" means them and people like them,

or any variant of the above that enables them to give their own personal tendencies to gloom and pessimism a broader justification.

They're not having children purely due to climate change? How tragic that they are being all "sackcloth and ashes" about something so fundamental when their having children won't make a jot of difference... and if everyone did as they did, we'd die out.

I suppose you have to look on the bright side if you have or want young children, and yes relative to parts of the past we are better off in many ways. However, my own young adult children are very reluctant to bring children into this world - they are not optimistic about the future of the world. Climate, war, terrible political leadership, poverty, racism ...it doesn't seem to be getting better and is as bad or worse as I ever remember.

Just as religious people have always attributed good to a higher power! I saw a poster outside a church yesterday that read 'Thank God for Harvest" and it made me think who do we thank for famine, then?
But while there is no evidence for God's goodness, there is evidence for climate change.

Nope, that doesn't follow.

The last several decades have seen a gradually accelerating series of warnings from climate scientists, from "climate change is becoming a real problem" to "it's a real problem that we really need to address SOON" to "if we don't address it in the next twenty years or so, it will become irreversible", to "if we don't address it in the next ten years or so, it will become irreversible", to "shit, it MIGHT be becoming irreversible now, we really need to do it NOW!", to the current situation where some scientists are saying it's irreversible (though some still aren't).

All the while, the idiots who are determined to ignore it go on ignoring it, and because there's so many of them governments carrying on with woefully insufficient policies in order to win their votes. And you think that's the fault of people telling them it's irreversible? If telling them it's NOT irreversible would be so much more effective, how come it had so little effect on them when it ACTUALLY wasn't irreversible and people told them that because it was the truth?

Then there's the fact that saying a certain level of warming is irreversible doesn't mean that we should do nothing to stop it getting even worse. If 1.5 degrees is irreversible then that's going to cause severe problems that hugely impact upon the way future societies operate and the likely quality of life of children born now. That doesn't mean that if we don't take action to LIMIT it to that, and allow it to get to 2 or 3 degrees instead, the results won't be catastophically worse.

Stop looking for reasons to let people of the hook. Climate reality is not going to do that, it is what it is. People have had all the time in the world to face it and mostly chosen not to, despite every different level of gentle persuasion through to forceful urgency through to fatalism in the messaging. If they insist on digging their own graves (and our children's with them) then it's nobody's fault but their own.

You can argue it's selfish to have children and selfish not to, so you can't win on that

Humans always have hope. That's why babies are born in war zones

The world may be more dangerous but it's also more fabulous. For every terrible thing there is some new medical advance.

I think what might be new in more modern times is a) climate change (but maybe we need new people to find ways to address that) and b) the internet and its ability to manipulate and create awful and inane echo chambers and to distract attention from serious issues. Sometimes you do wonder about the future of the human race.

Re 'having children wont make a jot of difference' - they're decision to not want to have children, is not based on population increase, which i presume you mean by your sarky 'sackcloth and ashes' comment.
They're decision is based on the shit those children will have to cope with as they grow older!
I was replying to the OPs question, wind your neck in!

I certainly don't have that in mind as a project (my reluctance to have kids would just be about their potentially unhappy lives as individuals). But regardless - why would that be a bad thing? At least then some remnant of the Earth's ecosystem might survive and other animals would have a chance of survival.

@Twillow

There's a big difference between the reality of climate change and the major issues this may bring, and the belief that there'll inevitably be an apocalypse of such "biblical" proportions that billions will die and any child we might bear will wish they'd never been born, so it's kindest not to bring such a child into the world at all.

Yes, and some scientific authorities are now predicting the latter, unless urgent action is taken on scale far beyond that being taken.

YANBU

Antinatalism is on the rise because people are hooked on the media's fear porn.

Be a rebel and have all the kids!

My mother in law said it was selfish to have more than 1 or 2 children. I have 2 children from a previous relationship and she is over the moon that we are expecting a baby (her first grandchild)
But everyone else is selfish of course.

Stop looking for reasons to let people of the hook.

The only reason you're assuming I'm letting people off the hook re: climate change is because you've come striding in here convinced that you're the only person Taking It Seriously. As with the pandemic, climate change is not something that is fixable by lecturing people sternly enough on the internet.

But you can't have it both ways here.

Either - human-caused climate change is already, irreversibly, going to plunge us into doom and collapse civilisation, and therefore it's unethical to bring children into that world. This seems to be what you were saying earlier.

Or - human-caused climate change is definitely a bad thing, but not one that will inevitably doom humanity. There are many possible futures. Therefore, it is not immoral to have children on the grounds that they'll inevitably face this hell, because they won't inevitably face this hell - the collapse of human civilisation is not inevitable.

You can't have it both ways - "it's wrong to have kids because the world is definitely ending, but also you're all selfish sods for not doing more to avert this thing I'm telling you can't be avoided now, it's all baked in."

Up until fairly recently the vast majority of people would be born, live a subsistence existence full of danger and hunger, and die early deaths due to malnutrition, disease or infection from injury.

This

I agree that we (as in humanity) should be doing more to combat climate change and there's a lot of frustrating politics and greed in the way, but it's not inevitable that it's going to lead to a dystopian horror movie scenario. There are already machines in operation that literally suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and sequester it - at the moment they're too expensive and small-scale to be helping very much, but that won't necessarily be the case ten or twenty years from now given how quicly technology progresses. If I wanted children I wouldn't be put off just because of the potential impact of climate change.

I have young adult DCs and have for years made it clear to them that I think that their having children would be the wrong decision, because of climate change. It is their decision, but much as I love young children, I would hate to have grandchildren, for their sake and for their parents' sake. It would probably break my heart if they were born into the future the scientists now foresee.
I didn't anticipate my children growing up into an End of Times scenario. But here we are.

The reliance on some pie-in-the sky technology which will rescue us at the last minute and allow life to continue as it is now is just denial.

What if the people who want to have kids agree to freeze eggs and sperm for 20 years, and then at the end of that period, if we're not all living in Mad Max world they can go ahead and have babies? That ok?

(I'm not serious. Have babies if you want them, babies are good.)

How do you know?